Sometimes I miss teaching philosophy. This evening I wanted a quick project, so I tried to design a metaphysics primer using only dots, circles, and arrows. Philosophers would object to some of my characterisations, but that's fine. The job of this primer is only to start discussions, and to give students a visual aid to consider the history of metaphysics.

If you teach philosophy, you're welcome to use and improve this, but please attribute it to me. (CC BY)

I've been learning to make optical illusions. It started when I got fascinated by this piece by Akiyoshi Kitaoka. There are no red pixels in these strawberries, which is sort of nuts. I put it in Illustrator, to find out how it all worked, by sucking out swatches.

Based on what I learned, I made my own illusion. Some people in the comments were suggesting the effect only works because we are used to seeing strawberries as red. But that's not right. It works because of Additive Colour Change. I made one with sneakers.

Home made fancy granola in jars. Dried cranberries make it sweet and festive. Here's a template recipe to customise to suit your taste. We've used it many times, and it works great.

Home made lime simple syrup (for mixing into cocktails, or serving with iced soda water). You could buy a bunch of those little bottles you find in hotel minibars. That way, a single batch could be distributed among many bottles, and then many stockings.

If you gave someone a cookbook, you could add some fancy pantry spices, or rose water, or pomegranate molasses - whatever the particular recipes require that the person doesn't have.

Raspberry Pi has been a round a while now, but keeps getting better. It's is a sort of tiny computer that you have to program yourself. It would be a great present for a budding computer scientist or programmer.

Do they go to the cinema on Boxing Day? That's a tradition for some folks. If so, you could make them the ultimate cinema snack pack. I don't know - jarritos, pretzels, chocolate almonds - whatever weird things they like.

Microphone. This Rode smartLav+ mic would be good if they want to get into podcasting or making videos for something.

An overnight travel bag.

A playlist of your favourite podcasts. A mixtape for the 21st century. (Free!) This could make a good mail-out gift to lots of people?

I'm applying for this fellowship that requires a "Teaching Philosophy Statement". It's a reflective piece of writing about how you approach pedagogy. Here's a draft.

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Teaching Philosophy Statement

No single piece of advice could capture what it means to teach effectively, but this might come close:

It is not enough to give the students flour and sugar and butter; you have to bake the cake with them.

I can’t remember who gave me that advice, but it is good advice for a number of reasons. First, it highlights the systematic nature of learning. Deep learning is not the endless memorising of concepts, but an understanding of how concepts interrelate with one another. Second, it highlights the collaborative and active nature of learning. The teacher bakes the cake with the students, and not for them. Third, it highlights the importance of teaching both skills and facts. Giving the students a fact is like giving them flour – somewhat useless and unpalatable by itself – but combined with the right skills, can be used to make a delicious cake, or any number of other things.

I have aimed to apply this to advice in my work – as a university lecturer, and as a designer of training programs for industry, government, and academic researchers. I’ll address those three elements in turn.

I saw Jon’s course, which looks amazing, and figured offering a design would be a nice evening project. Open science is certainly something I support; I’ve previously designed this one page overview of Open Access Journal Publishing.

As a general thing, I really believe having an overall course design is really important. It’s not enough to just illustrate concepts one-by-one in each lesson. You have to somehow tie the whole course together into a coherent whole, as I’ve tried to do here, here, and elsewhere.

“The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution.” - Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War(c400 BCE)

I got interested by the history of “innovation”. It turns out it’s old. And opinions of what it is, and whether it’s good, have evolved over time. So, I figured it would be fun, and possibly instructive, to put together a one-page history of innovation in quotes – from Thucydides to Management Consultancy, or something like that. Here’s a draft pdf. You'll probably have to zoom in to read it. It prints nicely in A3 landscape. Contributions very welcome!

I think I've previously mentioned that my mum collects four leaf clovers. In any case, she's since taken to breeding them. She took a sneaky cutting from a particularly prevalent patch outside a local library, and then selectively bred the patch for more leaves per clover. The natural prevalence of four leaf clovers is about 1 in 10,000. Mum's patch gets, like, 10 or 20 per day in a small cluster.

Anyway, for Christmas Mum gave me a cutting of her own clover plant. Very cool.

I planted it, and on the first day, possums or birds came and ate all the leaves. A tragedy. But then I replanted the small leafless stump in my vegepod (under the cover of netting), and now (a couple of months later) I'm getting 3 or 4 per day. Here are some I picked yesterday.

A dog that knew Diogenes from Edwin Landseer's Alexander and Diogenes (note that Diogenes was a Cynic, and Cynicism derives from an ancient Greek meaning "dog like".) Tricky one! But philosophers should have got it.